Employee advocacy is powerful tool for any organisation. Not only does it give you tremendous reach, it also elevates your message from mere advertising to interpersonal communication.

So what's the best way to get started on your journey towards employee advocacy bliss?

Encourage your employees to use social media

In many companies, the use of social media during work hours is frowned upon. Instead of keeping employees from social media, you should consider actively encouraging them to be active on LinkedIn and Facebook. Naturally, you should also provide them with shareable stories with which they can interact.

Once a culture for social media use has been established within your organisation, the next step is to formalise your efforts through an employee advocacy programme - and measure your efforts through validated learning.

The long term benefit

As a rule of thumb, each employee has a reach of roughly a thousand people in their network. This means that 1,000 employees have a potential reach of one million people!

These numbers alone should make you want to clear your desk and draft your employee advocacy programme right now.